This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on July 20, 2012. Prashant Bhargava passed away in 2015, and I still treasure the time he gave me and his lovely film, Patang.
I had the great fortune to be offered an opportunity to speak with director Prashant Bhargava about his wonderful film, Patang (which I also had the chance to review). Prashant was most generous with his time, and the result was this delightful conversation. My side is bolded; Prashant’s answers follow.
How does a guy from the south side of Chicago decide to make a film set against this backdrop of the kite festival in Ahmedabad?
When I was a kid, I used to go to India a lot, and I saw my uncles flying kites on the rooftops…and that was in Utter Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. And everybody around them, whether they were rich or poor, Hindu or Muslim, stared up at the sky with such wonder, and they forgot about all their tensions. I thought that kite flying in a simple way is a meditation that transcends boundaries, and so when I mentioned it to a cousin of mine, he said you must go – so, it’s eight years now, eight years ago I went there, and when I saw the kite festival, a million kites in the sky, and how vital this celebration was for the vitality and reach of a nation of the whole city, I knew I had to make the film.
Ahmedabad is a place that’s gone through a tremendous amount of religious violence in the past, as well as natural disasters, so this particular festival, known as “the day the wind direction changes”, it’s called Uttarayan — Makar Sakranti across the rest of India – it’s just something that everybody who’s been on both sides of the conflict or every age group, every gender, everybody’s just up there and it’s a really healing experience, which is the theme of the film.
That came across for me as a viewer, too. I felt very moved by the intensity of the celebration, and by the healing that was going on in that family.
And much of the stories came from a lot of research. I did three years of research, and I was very conscious that I was coming from the outside. I spent three years getting to know people, gossiping with the grandmothers, chasing kites with kids, interviewing kite makers, getting in trouble with the gamblers, all sorts of things. And a lot of the stories just arose from those experiences. I remember the first year that I was there, I was very shy. I would hide behind cars and tell people I’m shooting a documentary and I’m going to school, things of that sort, speaking in my broken Hindi. By the third year, I was able to hold the camera two feet from someone in the old city and they would continue to be themselves. That was not only the foundation for the storyboards, or for the story in terms of the script, but it was also a foundation for the process in which we made the film eventually.
One thing that strikes me, looking at your work, it’s not only the intense and beautiful visuals, but how often they’re connected to sound. For me as a viewer that created a much more intense, involving experience. I assume the visuals come from your background as a graphic artist, but how do you see that visual/sound connection?
I collaborated with some beautiful artists, and there are three components to that. One is the composing of the film, which was done by Mario Grigorov, who did Precious and Taxi to the Dark Side – and that was a really interesting process because the first few tracks that he provided, I didn’t connect with them, it was a very general Indian sound. So I suggested to him, “Let me come down to your place in LA,” and I sat with him for a week, and like two actors, we just got into it. There were three melodies of this film, one is of the kite, the other is of the brothers’ past, and the last is of the family house. And so we composed those melodies only on a piano, and then he brought in a group of musicians, that, based on those melodies, improvised and also worked with his compositions.
He eventually worked with Shubha Mudgal, which is a very famous artist in India, a Hindi vocalist, classical singer, and she’s the one who opens the film and closes the film and also during the climax, it’s her voice.
And then the second component was the tracks, the popular tracks in the film, and that was really cool. I didn’t meet any of these artists when we did it – I worked with a music supervisor, Shivani Ahlowalia, and we got in touch with a Denmark group, Djuma Soundsystem, electronic DJs, also another DJ in Brazil, Maga Bo, and then we had Hindi lyricists and vocalists, Pankaj Awasthi, Shilpa Rao and Papon, and they sang along with those tracks. I had ten tracks put in originally, and then it just came to this really wild place where everyone had this synergy across the internet and was talking – it was great.
And then the last component was sound design, and I worked with Dig It Audio who did Half Nelson, Man Push Cart, Sugar, Inside Job – and they are really well known for doing naturalist dramas. And so there was this process where we sat together for six hours and did a spotting session, and they squeezed out every detail about what I thought the sound landscape was, what was significant to the narrative, what was happening in the scenes – so much so that eventually, when they started doing the sound design, at that point it was so open in the beginning about trying to get all the information from me, that they even said, “You need to go back and edit this one section.”
And one of the great scenes they did was the kite battle, that was like a gladiator scene, you know. I gave them a Nike World Cup commercial with grand sound design and all these kinds of slowing of things happening, and so Abigail Savage, the sound designer, she based the kite battle on this gladiator battle with sword slashings and bombs blowing up.
Again, as a viewer, it was one of those moments that was really intense. I’m wondering, too, about the tension between old and new – it was something I saw in Sangam as well as in Patang, whether in Sangam it’s between the guy raised in the US and the new immigrant, and in Patang it’s between Delhi and Ahmedabad or new and old Ahmedabad. Part of me is sure that it’s what creates a good story, that drama, but are there deeper reasons for those tensions between old and new in your work?
I think you make films because in some way or another it’s therapy, you know? I think when you watch Sangam, it’s much more a film about longing, longing for that fullness, and in Ahmedabad it comes from a slightly different perspective, where the fullness exists and how do you maintain it or have it continue in your family in a larger way. So, there are very strong issues, and what I was very conscious of was when I did the research was those conflicts that originally would have been thought of as happening fifteen or twenty years ago from the west to India, now exist in extreme ways within India itself. So you have someone coming from the large city of Delhi, which is as foreign, in a way, as someone coming from America to a small town in India, and that kind of dilemma within India was something I found very interesting.
I’ve heard that Seema Biswaas originally felt her character to be a little bit of a backdrop – but for me as a viewer, though, she seems essential to the story. Was that always your intention, or was that something that you and she developed when she came on board?
It was always my intention, it was just that on the written page, she doesn’t have a lot of dialogue, so when you read the script, it can seem like this is just a typical housewife and it doesn’t have that kind of weight or power. But so much of her moments are told through silence and those intimate gestures of trying to calm her son down or nurture everyone in the household, you know? But she later on referred to her character as the water in the house, that she had no place of her own, but whatever gap needed to be filled, she filled it, and that was the definition of how she approached her character. And that one exchange that she has with Jayesh at the end when she says the thematic line of the film, that we don’t hold onto our past with sadness, we hold on to happiness, our little, little happiness – that is something that is everything for me in terms of what the film means. It’s her and the grandmother which are the two positive characters in the film – I mean, maintaining and pushing this family forward. In another way, all the men in the film are kind of screw-ups.
(We both laugh at this point.)
She’s very much based upon my own mother. I convinced her through a long email to come and see what we were doing in Ahmedabad, and when she came and she saw the relationships that I had with the kids, and how open it was and how much it was like family and it was not an environment that you would normally see on a film set. She also spent time with my mother and my mother and her went around to different households of people that I met throughout my experiences that were like Sudha. And so, that instant kind of connection and refreshing process that we were engaging in really attracted her to the project.
I was also hoping you could talk a little bit about Hamid and his place in your film, because for me he was almost like this little voice of wisdom, reading human nature better than the adults around him.
He’s an amazing kid. Overall we did a workshop with twelve kids for two and a half months – we did theatre games, discipline exercises, would just have them become comfortable with one another, and I did an audition at the end where I had the kids bounce a ball for two blocks, and I gave them twenty rupees and I said, “Buy a couple of things,” and two blocks down the other way I already had a bunch of kids that were ready to steal that ball, so I could see what his reaction would be, and also just going and trying to bargain with the shopkeepers, so when I saw him, what you said, there was a resilience to the kid, a wisdom about him. My favorite scene in the film with him is when he sits with Chakku, and Chakku’s complaining to him about his uncle, and you know, he’s a businessman, and when the kids says, “Yeah, but he’s going to lose, too” – I didn’t write that, it was just something he came up with. He comes from a rough neighbourhood, he has a good family structure, but that line was his own. I think he’s gone through so much in his life in terms of seeing adversity that he has an innate wisdom about him and there’s also this purity of his own laughter and who he is.
For Nawaz Siddiqui who plays his counterpart in terms of Chakku, this was Nawaz’s first leading role in a feature film, and this year he has three films in Cannes and eleven films releasing. And for him, this experience of Patang, working with Hamid was probably the most transformative in his career. He had to let go completely of all of that “acting” and just be, because on and off screen, Nawaz was not Nawaz to Hamid, Nawaz was always Chakku.
Yes, I was struck by the incredible casting – not only the actors, but even the non-actors you managed to get to work in the film, it was just a lovely combination.
I was wondering if there was any one pivotal point in the production that could have made or broken your film, and you were fortunate that it went your way?
There was a really bad thing that happened. In that fireworks scene, where they’re blowing up fireworks, everyone in the film was rather careless. We had a big bag of fireworks, and these kids were blowing them up, and Chakku was blowing them up and having fun, and one of the kids took one of the large fireworks and put it down, and then took another one and put it to the side – and these are Fourth of July type fireworks that blow up in the sky really big – and he lit it, and it hit the side wall of the roof and blew up and the clay went into Chakku’s eyes. For a number of days it seemed he would go blind, everyone was completely…broke apart the whole film set, we were ready to shut down, and it was only three days or four days before the kite festival itself, meaning if it did happen, we would have not been able to complete the film that year.
Luckily, things did after two days kind of calm down. For two days I was shooting on my own, and eventually it all came back together, but that was a huge catastrophe, and luckily Nawaz turned out to be okay, we had a great eye surgeon and all of that, but it was very, very scary.
(I was a little speechless at this point. Prashant continued.)
There was a time when that happened – this is a little bit of a side point – I came home from the hospital, because I was flipping out, and I didn’t want to….Nawaz had been recently married, and I didn’t want his wife to see the state, that energy that I had, so I came home early and got off two blocks ahead of the hotel where we were, and I was walking down the street, and there were seven cows in the middle of the street, and it was completely quiet. And when I was twenty feet from the cows, one of them looked at me, and all seven of them ran the other way. And my point of that is, there is something very unset, divine, something very fate-driven, spiritual thing about that old city, where energies that you carry with you come back. And what was really haunting about that scene was that I had written it for Hamid to fall off the roof, but then to have this catastrophe happen, you feel like you’re almost a puppet-master of some sort of tragedy. It was really a crazy place to be, emotionally, for everyone. Just a little insight into where I was at.
Can you speak to me a little about how the wind changes direction in your film?
It’s a very gentle metaphor with the kite –like The Red Balloon or The Red Violin which were influences for me. That’s almost the puppet-master where everyone’s connected to that. And what I noticed when I was doing research, is that every person in the city during this festival, including myself, goes through some sort of small change during this day. There’s something extremely powerful about it. And everybody’s life — I mean, excluding Hamid, which is a relentless….he doesn’t have a lot of arc, he’s just the soul of the film –but everybody else, in a tiny way, through the interactions of the celebration of the festival and the relationships that they form, their life changes in a little way, like the wind changing direction. It’s very gentle, you know?
One of the things that struck me is that this is the second film I’ve seen in the last year, from a director from an Indian background but raised and educated in the US, who’s decided to produce a very independent type of film set in India. I think you’ve mentioned a little bit why that was important, but I’m wondering if you could expand a little bit more on that. – maybe even the perspective you bring to India and the stories you set there.
At some point when you ask, why do you make films, there are reasons you think of in terms of where the stories come from, but after the first month of kind of conceptualizing something it’s just an addiction and you have to keep going and doing it and it’s a part of you. So you wake up and you have a knot in your stomach and you lose all the girlfriends that you had, and you go broke in so many other ways, but this is it, this is when you feel most alive, and I would say when I’m in India making this film I felt so alive as a person, so just thrilled and present, especially working in the old city of Ahmedabad, I just fell in love.
As far as this film in relation to India, this is a kind of revolutionary film for them, because in 2007 and 8, we were probably one of the first to do a narrative feature on a digital medium, it was Nawaz Siddiqui’s first role, overall for the whole cast and crew there were many, many times when people just thought I was completely an idiot the way I was working – long takes, loosely based on this script, only three people out of the forty are actors, improvising, hand-holding camera, no storyboards, two people shooting, very tiny crew – aiming for this naturalism and allowing people to live onscreen. And so all of these kind of techniques were very, very new for India, and also for the independent movement. And I’m really thrilled that ninety percent of the independent India film coming now has major presence of my cast and crew on their films, and it’s made an enormous impact on India as a film, in its process and how we worked. And you’re seeing a lot more of that now echoed in the wave, whether the cinematic language, or it’s the naturalism that’s emerging from India.
Right now India’s going through something quite remarkable, it’s like the independent movement that happened years earlier with Sex, Lies and Videotape, at that time in the late 80s and early 90s in America, it’s happening now in India with the access to technology and all of that. People are really taking a lot more risk and it’s really impressive to see – it’s electric over there.
But I am very conscious as well that I see the world from a very different point of view than my fellow independent filmmaker in India. The things that I notice and that I try to focus on are very different than what they are.
So, where are you going next?
I’m working hard on the release, really, really excited, and it’s going well, and I just shot a film in Madurai, in India, and it’s a collaboration with Vijay Iyer, a jazz musician, and it’s based on Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”. This is an Indian rite of spring, Holi, where they throw colours, and I shot it in Lord Krishna’s birthplace, in his playground there, and they celebrate for ten days and it’s very violent and primal and sexual, and just absolutely beautiful! I’m editing that this summer. And then I’m writing a film that takes place on the South Side of Chicago, on the golf courses – it’s called The Highlands, and it’s a coming of age story of a nineteen-year-old kid – black folks, Kangos, Cadillacs, hustling on the golf courses, and it’s a story of a nineteen-year-old kid and how he emerges from being someone who represses his talents from an older hustler, and I’d like to shoot in the same way that I did Patang, 90 per cent non-actors, and really make an anthem for the South Side of Chicago.